Antoni Tàpies’ Hybrid Conception of Work of Art: Thingness, Playfulness, and Experience

Abstract

Antoni Tàpies conferred new meanings to everyday things through his singular creative processes and material-object arrangements. Moreover, he brought the objects, materials, and subjects of art into a sensorial and intellectual play to achieve a sui generis view of art. The analysis of his hybrid conception of artwork has three points of exploration. First, he questioned the character of the thingness of artwork as well as thingness in work of art. Second, his artistic creations achieved an exceptional sense of playfulness through the recontextualisation of words, things, everyday objects, and matter. Third, influenced by East Asian aesthetic schools of thought, Tàpies’ works of art display change and transience as the essence of material things, which are, together with the idea of hybrid or hybridisation, the protagonists of his art. At the same time, Tàpies invited the audience of his art to question its meaning, to be its cocreator, and to meditate on it.